ENID, Okla. — Enid resident Corey Henson doesn’t have to take the time to drop off recyclable items at the city’s Recycle Center once a week.
Instead, she wants to.
Henson lived in Edmond as a child and then spent a number of years living in California, where “the trash can was smaller than the recycling bins.”
Since the city of Enid doesn’t have a citywide curbside pickup for recyclable materials, Henson said she’s found a “happy medium” with the Recycle Center, where she has become a regular since moving back to Oklahoma 20 years ago.
“We get to not only build these relationships with some awesome people (who work there) who have a big chunk of my heart, but also just perpetuate that whole feeling of being able to reuse, repurpose and recycle,” Henson said.
The Enid Recycle Center is located at 115 E. Chestnut. (Kelci McKendrick / Enid News & Eagle)
‘That’s a million pounds’
When a vehicle pulls up to the Recycle Center at 115 E. Chestnut, workers grab the recyclable items from the vehicle, sort through them and place them into their respectable trailers.
Eight more staff work at the “drop site” at 1110 W. Spruce, where materials are taken and processed. Whenever the trailers get full, they are brought to the drop site, sorted, baled, then transported to Batliner Recycling in Oklahoma City.
Enid’s Recycle Center is open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday.
The center accepts items such as electronics, cardboard and paperboard, paper, passenger tires, aluminum cans, tin and steel cans and plastic No. 1 and No. 2 bottles. Items not accepted include oil, antifreeze, latex paint, glass, styrofoam and light bulbs.
About 40 vehicles stop by every day to drop off recyclable items, but supervisor Catherine Breitenkamp said she’s sometimes seen nearly 100 cars.
The average load transported to OKC weighs about 45,395 pounds, according to Pioneer Industries, which owns the OKC recycling center.
The Recycle Center contracts with Chris Feeney, the director of vocational services for Supported Community Lifestyles, an Oklahoma-based services agency for people with disabilities. SCL’s clients are staffed at the Recycle Center and at the “drop site.”
“That’s one of the best things about recycling, is that it provides so many different types of jobs,” Feeney said. “We’ve got these jobs, sorting jobs and baling jobs. We’ve got routes where they’re out picking stuff up. There’s so many different things in different ways that people can interact with the community, which is wonderful, and that’s the ultimate goal — integration.”
Breitenkamp, who’s worked with the Recycle Center for almost 27 years, said there’s no place she’d rather be.
“This is home. I do this to save our environment,” she said. “A lot of people don’t care, and our landfill space is filling up fast, and there’s no hills here, but we have them right out there simply because people refuse to recycle.”
In the last year, the recycle center received over 1 million pounds in 23 total loads — from July 2020 to June 2021 — and included 752,111 pounds of old corrugated containers, 221,240 pounds of mixed paper, 51,009 pounds of plastic commingle, 13,702 pounds of tin and 6,018 pounds of aluminum cans.
The environmental impact of these numbers means 8,273 trees, 2,744,850 kilowatt hours, 487 tons of CO2, 3,406,728 gallons of water and 46,462 feet of the landfill were saved.
Amy Rodgers, environmental specialist for the city of Enid, said the Recycle Center makes a difference for the environment because it keeps trash that can be recycled out of the landfill.
“That’s the No. 1 thing — that’s a million pounds that didn’t go into the landfill, and the city’s residents pay for our landfill, so the faster we fill it up, the faster we have to pay to expand it,” Rodgers said.
‘It’s basically a cost’
City officials say funding is the biggest hurdle to implement its own curbside recycling program.
City Manager Jerald Gilbert said Enid used to have a recycling program, but said it ended about 20 years ago because it was determined it wasn’t “cost-effective.”
Tim Stephens, supervisor of Enid’s Solid Waste Department, said recycling program is “out of our realm” because of the money and work it would take to implement.
“You don’t make money when you recycle,” he said. “It’s basically a cost, and you have to weigh the benefits and what’s going on with the rest of the city, and it makes it really difficult sometimes to have programs like that when we’re trying to do big programs like the Kaw Lake (Water Supply) project.”
Stephens said new pickup trucks would be needed, then more employees would be needed to drive the trucks and separate the items. Baling, organizing and shipping everything after separation is also something that would have to be figured out, too.
Stephens said on average, the Recycle Center makes about $35,000 to $40,000 per year.
Shane Hughes (left) and Shane Lighty place cardboard boxes into a recycling trailer at the Enid Recycle Center on Thursday, July 8, 2021. (Kelci McKendrick / Enid News & Eagle)
The projected budget for Solid Waste Services for the 2021-2022 fiscal year is $4,545,655 — those expenses go toward personnel, maintenance operations, running the landfill and running the commercial and residential trash services.
Stephens said it’s impossible to track the types of waste that go into the landfill — which was approved in December for early expanding studies.
He said he thinks if more people recycled, or had greater access to recycle such as through a curbside recycling program, it would slow the rate of expansion.
“But when it comes down to it, it’s cheaper to put the trash in the landfill than it is to recycle,” Stephens said. “That’s just how it is … and that’s basically the ugly truth of it. … And that’s where it gets complicated because we want to do the right thing, but at what cost?”
The city of Stillwater has a citywide curbside recycling program that collects No. 1, No. 2 and No. 5 plastics, cardboard, tin, aluminum and paper. Residents choose between a 35-, 65- or 95-gallon cart that is picked up once a week, Stillwater’s Waste Management Director Chris Knight said in an email.
Knight said the program costs approximately $400,000 a year. Construction of a recycling staging facility was approved in October, costing the city an additional $165,910.
“In my opinion, the program has been successful because as a whole, our community is very conscious of the environment,” Knight said in the email. “The citizens want to do the right thing and not bury material that can be remade into the same material or other materials. Our organization does a good job of providing the citizens with educational materials to assist them with understanding what is accepted and why other materials are not.”
Henson said she’s happy her three daughters have grown up watching her recycle — they’ve also gone with her to the Recycle Center.
“I want to send out three amazing gifts into the world, and this is just one little tiny aspect of it that helps create those amazing people, and creates a better world,” she said. “It’s a trickle-down — better people, better world.”
